More Bosons and a Geeky Backpack

Posted on 23/07/2010 by Jon Butterworth

See also Chapter 3.4 of Smashing Physics.

Ok, I registered, and now have yet another geeky backpack, a pen, and a map of Paris. Plus a dog-tag with my name and “ICHEP 2010” on so that security don’t throw me out. Excellent. Off to a day of parallel talk sessions.

A very crowded Higgs session at ICHEP (photo: Mike Paterson)

In one room the audience were hearing how well the LHC detectors were working, which is very well indeed. This is a major achievement, not to be taken for granted. They have come into operation much more smoothly than is usual for highly complex particle detectors.

However, I basically knew that already, so I went to another very crowded session where the latest HERA and Tevatron measurements of the W and Z bosons were being shown, along with the very first measurements of these particles from ATLAS and CMS at the LHC.

The rest of this entry is on the Guardian Science blog.

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Heading off to ICHEP

Posted on 22/07/2010 by Jon Butterworth

See also Chapter 3.4 of Smashing Physics.

I’m writing this on the Eurostar at St.Pancras, waiting for it to pull out of the station and take us to Paris, and the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP).

Of course there are many international conferences on high energy physics, it’s a completely international subject. But there’s only one ICHEP. Well, one every two years, anyway. And this, after many promises and a false start, is the ICHEP where first data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be presented to the world.

The rest of this post is on the Guardian Science blog.

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Quarks, Gluons and Jets

Posted on 18/07/2010 by Jon Butterworth

An updated version of this post is now on The Guardian. See also the glossary section after Chapter 1.5 of Smashing Physics.

Yesterday we (ATLAS) released our first (preliminary) jet cross section measurement.

“Cross section” in this context is basically a probability. If you fire two footballs at each other, they have a bigger cross-sectional area than two snooker balls, so they are more likely to hit each other. A “jet cross section” is a measure of how likely we are to see jets when we fire two protons at each other.

An ATLAS event with two jets.

Jets are what quarks and gluons do when they try to escape. The proton is made up of quarks stuck together by gluons (the name gluon is itself, I guess, an early geekjoke). Most of the fundamental forces get weaker with distance – the Earth’s gravitational pull gets weaker the the further out into space you go, for example. But the strong nuclear force is the other way round.

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Self Reference

Posted on 17/07/2010 by Jon Butterworth
I guess every blogger has to blog about blogging at some point. I was on a panel of science bloggers at a talkfest organised by Alice Bell and Beck Smith last week, so it has been on my mind, and this is my self-referential blog. If you are not up for a bit of navel-gazing, move right along. But see also Chapter 1.6 of Smashing Physics.

First – thanks to everyone; organisers, bakers, fellow panelists and audience. Weird but stimulating experience walking into a room full of people 90% of whom you have never met but have exchanged tweets with. Glad to have met lots of you now.

Somewhere between Gospel Oak and Barking, taken by Leon. Something to do with windows also being mirrors?

One, fundamental, question was: Why blog? The answer I gave was that I got into it because of the opportunity and interest provided by the LHC startup, and basically can’t keep my mouth shut. The mouth was probably more obvious in the pub than on the panel, but writing is the point here. I really enjoy writing in general. Writing scientific papers is fun and challenging, and I even try to make them interesting sometimes, but the blog provides more scope for creativity and fun.

I know there’s a continuum, from scientists who blog a bit through to full-time professional writers who report and explain a wide variety of science done by others. I’m near the former end of the spectrum.

On a Mission From…?

Several commenters felt that science bloggers lacked ambition. Don’t we want to change the world?

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